On the go and no time to finish that story right now? Your News is the place for you to save content to read later from any device. Register with us and content you save will appear here so you can access them to read later.

She said 86.1 per cent of young people were now receiving mental health care within three weeks, which exceeded the national target of 80 per cent.

Hawke's Bay Mental Health Services had been transformed through a new model of care introduced from 2015.

"Much of the new model of care is focused on making it easier for everyone to access mental health services and we have moved a number of services out into the community and closer to people's homes."

The DHB had also opened a new $20 million mental health unit, Nga Rau Rakau, earlier this year, designed to meet the needs of all age groups with appropriate accommodation, treatment areas and rooms.

Ms Stevenson said there had been considerable work done to improve wait times for young people needing to access mental health services including ongoing recruitment and opening clinics in Napier, Wairoa and Central Hawke's Bay as well as from Hawke's Bay Hospital.

Support offered to young people included psychiatrists, nurses, family therapists, psychologists, social workers and councillors. The DHB also offered occupational therapists, a dietitian and a Pou Arahi or cultural strategist and mediator, she said.

Nationwide, 30 per cent of young people waited more than three weeks to see a provider in the year to March.

Green Party health spokesman Kevin Hague said more and more people in the community needed mental health support. For young people, that need was often urgent.

"If you think about the situation of a young person who needs assistance ... waiting three weeks is intolerable, let alone the eight weeks that some people have."

Mr Hague, who is a former DHB chief executive, said a young person waiting weeks or months for help would experience worsening mental health problems.

"So we're looking at self-harm, we're looking at depression, we're looking at kind of starting to fail in school and I guess at the worst end of things it may be suicide that we're talking about."

If a young person didn't receive the health services they needed to thrive, it could also have lifelong consequences.

"By not meeting their needs now we are ensuring that we will have bigger problems for them to deal with and for our services to have to try and deal with later on in their lives."

Mr Hague said he wanted an urgent increase in mental health funding, a reinstatement of the Mental Health Commission and an urgent nationwide inquiry into mental health services.

He'd been hearing of more and more cases of things going disastrously wrong for individuals and the cases had "the hallmarks of a system in crisis", he said.